Asian Cinema - Current Issue

This article uses emerging discourses on the Tibetan New Wave as an opportunity to revisit the concept of shaoshu minzu dianying (ethnic minority cinema), a key term referring to Chinese films representing ethnic minority subjects. Nonetheless, by pointing out its porous and essentialist nature, the article cautions against what it terms an ‘ethnicized reading’ of Tibetan New Wave films. It is tempting to dwell on their authentic ventilation of Tibetan culture vis-à-vis old Tibetan films’ lack of it, and hence appreciate the artistic merit in this regard. Such reading is no less than treating ethnic minority filmmakers as the perpetual narrators of national allegories, burdening them with the necessary representation of ethnic experiences. Having problematized the ethnic minority cinema framework as exemplifying ethnicized reading, this article explains what is at stake when employing an ethnicized reading to study minority cultural productions and how the multifaceted motifs and genres of the Tibetan New Wave resist a totalizing ethnicized reading.

Indonesian documentary filmmaking has been riding the global wave of unprecedented interest in the creation, distribution and viewing of environmental documentaries. One of the frontrunners is investigative journalist and filmmaker Dandhy Laksono (b. 1976). With his production house, Watchdoc, and other collaborators since the late 2000s, he has created an extraordinary quantity of thought-provoking environmental and sociopolitical documentaries, many of which have received millions of views. In addition to public screenings in hundreds of Indonesian villages, the popularity of these documentaries has been driven by their streaming on online platforms, particularly YouTube. I argue that Laksono’s work is not merely about nature but about the politics of the environment. The film director not only criticizes political and social structures and practices with a destructive impact on the natural environment but also presents alternative, more sustainable visions for our planet based on Gunter Pauli’s model of the Blue Economy. His documentaries address these environmental politics and alternative visions not only through their content but also through their participatory modes of representation and distribution. This article discusses the politics of the participatory by focusing on the aesthetic modes of address for inviting audience involvement; the promotion of the commons as a cause or ideal in communication and social and environmental affairs; the representation and expression of diverse social, cultural and political voices, including those of marginalized groups; the use of public screenings and interactive media for the sharing and creating of content, and the social debates, connections and actions established through these communicative processes.

Accompanying the increasing immersiveness of cinema in the past two decades, represented by the wide application of 3D technologies, large format screens and experiments with high frame rates, China has developed its own domestic projection technology called Cinity since the late 2010s. This article examines the development of Cinity within the context of China’s global technological film aspirations and its desire to project Chinese films, and Chinese screening technology, to the world. While the uptake of Cinity internationally has been limited, the technology marks one of China’s latest efforts to upgrade its film industry as well as the ongoing nexus of China’s collaboration and competition with Hollywood. The article provides case studies of Ang Lee’s Gemini Man (2019) and Frant Gwo’s The Wandering Earth 2 (2023) to examine the changing trajectories of this technology’s projection before and after the COVID-19 pandemic.

On 24 February 2023, Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s masterpiece was re-released in movie theatres across Taiwan. Like its initial release three decades prior, the film once again sparked debates regarding the entwinement of politics and aesthetics. Considering the intricate fusion of the political and the lyrical, this article examines the ideological operation of the lyrical tradition through which the state apparatus legitimized its domination in post-war Taiwan. Furthermore, this study explains the core elements of the Chinese lyrical tradition as expounded by Sinologist Shih-hsiang Chen, emphasizing its ideological mechanism of replacing the particular and the historical with the general and the universal. Applying this observation to Hou’s film A City of Sadness, this article elucidates the intricate intertwining of its long-take aesthetics and political complications. In conclusion, I propose a discerning reassessment of the legacy of the Chinese lyrical tradition, an essential endeavour required as we venture into the new millennium.

Written in 1983, this article has been considered the magnum opus of the Hong Kong film scholar Lam Nin-tung (林年同, 1944–90). For Lam, even though the cinema is technologically and ideologically configured according to the European theory of perspective, Chinese filmmakers have long experimented with spatializing the relationship between the spectator’s body and the image by layering views of reality onto a two-dimensional frame. In so doing, Lam sees the cinematographic image-consciousness as a process of mirroring-journeying, a ground-breaking understanding of the cinema that is drawn from aesthetic debates both in China and Europe and offers an intervention that predates and is comparable to film phenomenology and Deleuzian philosophy.

In this article, Lam Nin-tung’s own notes are provided as numbered side notes, whereas the translators’ notes (marked by typographical symbols) are placed at the end of each section. All dates are Common Era unless specified otherwise.

A wide-ranging career interview with Hong Kong filmmaker Johnnie To. The interview canvasses To’s early career and filmic influences, the founding of his production company, Milkyway Image, his flirtation with Hollywood, his taste in acting and his adjustment to new film technologies. In addition, To recounts the making of key films in his oeuvre, reveals his views on the current state of Hong Kong cinema and ruminates on the prospects of a second Election sequel.

Review of: Satyajit Ray: The Man Who Knew Too Much, Barun Chanda (2022)

New Delhi: Om Books International, 347 pp.,

ISBN 978-9-39283-465-3, p/bk, $11.99